China and the Law of Unintended ConsequencesProvidence, 3.20.17By Alan W. Dowd

China plans to introduce “birth rewards and subsidies to
encourage people to have a second child,” Reuters reports.
This comes on the heels of Beijing’s decision in 2015 to end the monstrous one-child
policy. It seems someone in Beijing’s halls of power has realized that this
sort of industrial-scale social engineering has enormous unintended
consequences.

As a result of the one-child policy, which Deng Xiaoping (China’s “paramount
leader” after Mao’s death) said was necessary to make sure “the fruits of
economic growth are not devoured by population growth,” 336
million abortions have been performed, with the scythe decimating China’s
female population. The ratio of newborn girls to newborn boys is 100:119. The
biological norm is 100:103.

Some of the abortions are involuntary; some of the illegal
births lead to involuntary sterilization. Beijing allows families to pay a fine
and keep their baby if they exceed their state-mandated allotment of children, but
most families cannot pay the fine. In a 2012 case, as The Washington Post details,
government officials arrested a woman after she became pregnant with her second
child. Seven months into her pregnancy, they demanded $6,000 in fines. “When
the family couldn't get the money together, the officials gave her an injection
that killed the baby, whom the mother delivered stillborn while in police
custody.” Government officials then forced the woman to wait alongside her
baby’s body while paperwork was processed.

Calloused by decades of mass-purges and manmade famines, Beijing
is not moved by such stories. What has gotten Beijing’s attention is how the
one-child policy has deformed China’s demographics. Thanks to the one-child
policy, China’s population is rapidly aging. By 2040, the number of working-age
adults in China will shrink by 10 percent—a loss of 90 million workers. The
number of senior citizens in China is growing by 3.7 percent annually—a
staggering figure, according to demographers.

ImpactsWhat does this have to do with U.S. foreign policy and international security?

First, a regime capable of forcing its subjects to have
abortions for the good of the state, a regime capable of doing what China did
to that young mother, a regime so devoid of conscience, is capable of
justifying anything.

Second, although the cause of low birth rates in China and
the West is drastically different, China’s demographic crisis is, in many ways,
simply a nastier version of what awaits the West.

In 2010, the U.S. birthrate dropped below the replacement
fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman. Birthrates are even lower in
Europe. As birthrates decline—whether due to Malthusian government diktats,
abortion-as-birth-control, or people simply choosing to forgo
parenthood—countries get older fast. RANDreports that 30 percent of Europe’s population will be older than 65 by
2050—double what it was in 2000. In the United States, there were once 16
workers to support every Social Security pensioner. Today, there are about
three.

This, too, is impacting foreign policy and international
security. Aging populations create ever-greater demands on entitlement
programs, which consume resources needed for national defense. European
governments faced this reality a generation ago, and most of them chose to stop
investing in defense. The bipartisan gamble known as sequestration, which
guillotined America’s military even as new entitlement programs were created,
is a manifestation of these demographic pressures.

Third, such an imbalance between males and females portends grave
societal problems for China and perhaps serious security challenges for the rest
of the world. A society without female influence is the stuff of nightmares.

As Rob Brooks, who researches the evolution of sexual
behavior, observes,
young men without prospects for a mate tend to “discount their futures…They
also become more violent.” He points out that every one-percent increase in the
male-to-female ratio “results in a six-percent increase in the rates of violent
and property crime.” Indeed, “parts of China with the most male-biased sex
ratios” are experiencing more crime and other social ills, with “gambling,
alcohol and drug abuse, kidnapping, and trafficking of women…rising steeply in
China.”

Brooks also notes that historians connect disruptive and
often-violent eras such as the Crusades, colonial expansion and even America’s Wild
West to “a surplus of ambitious and aggressive young men with otherwise poor
reproductive prospects.” It’s not unthinkable that Beijing, in a bid to distract
a restive populace from the unintended consequences of the one-child policy,
might use its reservoir of young males to launch overseas adventures that upset
the liberal international order.

Unknowns

It was Charles Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge who wished some
people were dead in order “to decrease the surplus population.” China, in a
sense, followed Scrooge’s population-control plan, and the world will reap the
whirlwind.

There’s no way to quantify what the one-child
policy has cost humanity or what abortion’s many victims—in China and the West—might
have discovered, invented, built or solved. But Psalm 139 suggests that from
His perch outside the box of time, the Lord has kept a tally of what might have
been: “Your eyes saw my unformed body…All the days ordained for me were
written in your book”— all the lives unlived, all the dreams unfulfilled, all
the poems and treaties unwritten, all the breakthroughs unknown, all the conflicts
unsettled.